Product Placement: Our Favorite Custom Promotional Vehicles

of 17

We live in a world of commerce. We’re surrounded by promotions, spiels, display ads, pop-up ads, email pitches, and Super Bowl halftime shows brought to you by Pepsi Zero Sugar. Human civilization can be summarized in three words: Always be closing.

So it’s no surprise that cars, like everything else, have been enrolled in the noble cause of selling stuff. Most compellingly, they’ve done so as promotional vehicles, machines designed and crafted to extend the public’s goodwill toward a product or service. Some of these creations are the result of intense consideration and testing with focus groups. Some are almost accidental icons. None of them have made it into the Smithsonian’s permanent collections. Yet.

We’re talking about vehicles that exhibit a little more imagination than cab-over trucks fitted with billboards. All of them have been modified to the point that they can’t be mistaken for some run-of-the-mill production vehicle. They’re part of our capitalistic culture like Woolworth’s, Montgomery Ward, and Borders. And, like those three great titans of retailing, these vehicles will last forever.

By John Pearley Huffman

1939 Pontiac Ghost Car

The 1939 New York World’s Fair was a needed jolt of optimism at a time when the Great Depression was grinding on and rumblings of war could be heard in Europe. With displays from around the planet and virtually every large industrial firm, the fair presented a robust vision of the future. And in General Motors’ Highways and Horizons exhibit there sat a Pontiac Deluxe Six skinned in transparent plexiglass. It was fully functional and drivable but finished so that fair goers could see the engineering substance built into modern automobiles.

Plexiglass is an ordinary thing today, but in the 1930s it was a brand-new, miraculous material. And the sheer scale of its use in this World’s Fair car and in a second Pontiac, built months later for a California fair—one built to appear as the new C body and the other as the older B body—was astonishing. Nothing like this pair had ever been seen before.

By John Pearley Huffman

Photos By RM Auctions

1939 Pontiac Ghost Car

To produce curved plastic body panels that were optically clear was a great technical achievement. The two (and there may have been more) cars were built at GM’s Fisher Body using massive ovens to shape the plastic. It’s assumed by some historians that the original stamping dies were used to ensure a perfect shape. Reportedly, the cars each cost $25,000 to build back then—that’s almost $434,000 in 2017 dollars.

The display of the transparent Pontiacs allowed GM to show off advanced features such as concealed door hinges and an independent front suspension. But the cars were an even better showcase for plexiglass itself. Introduced by the Rohm and Haas Company in 1933, it would be used to make everything from fish tanks to—prominently during World War II—aircraft windshields, turrets, and nose cones.

By John Pearley Huffman

Photos By RM Auctions

1939 Pontiac Ghost Car

In 2011, one of the Ghost Pontiacs—a 1939 Deluxe Six wearing 1940 trim—was sold at auction for $308,000. With World War II coming, there almost wasn’t time for the transparent cars to boost Pontiac sales before production was halted for the war effort. But these cars helped make acrylic plastics part of all of our lives, for better or worse. And, in fact, this is one promotional vehicle that did make it into the Smithsonian—temporarily—where it was displayed during World War II.

By John Pearley Huffman

Photos By RM Auctions

Hot Wheels Deora II and Twin Mill

Ever since 1968, Mattel’s Hot Wheels toy cars have been the gateway drug into a lifetime of automotive addiction. But while there are many Hot Wheels based on real cars, there are only a few real cars based on Hot Wheels.

Two promotional cars made at Mattel’s behest are full-size renditions of Hot Wheels. The first is the Deora II, the scaled-up version of a 2000 successor to the legendary Deora show truck. The original 1960s Deora was built using a Dodge A100 forward-control pickup, with the rear window of a 1960 Ford station wagon as the windshield.

To build the real-life Deora II, in 2003 Mattel commissioned hot-rod builder Chip Foose to scale up designer Nathan Proch’s design, which used the general shape of a Ford Taurus wagon’s tail to define the cab. But the Deora II wasn’t based on anything specifically. So Foose took a new Cadillac DeVille, cut it apart, and moved the Northstar V-8 and its transmission to the back. Everything forward is fabricated.

By John Pearley Huffman

Photos By Mattel

Hot Wheels Deora II and Twin Mill

Mattel contracted Boyd Coddington to build a full-size Twin Mill in 1996. The timing was terrible, however, as Coddington’s California operation went into bankruptcy during 1998, and it seemed the project would forever be lost in the tumult. But somehow the car survived and was completed by Barry Lobeck’s shop in Ohio. It made its debut at the 2001 SEMA show in Las Vegas.

Those are two real, blown 502-cubic-inch, Chevrolet big-block V-8s astride the Twin Mill’s nose. They are joined together by a transfer plate from a competition pulling tractor and feed a single Torqueflite automatic transmission that in turn sends thrust to a Ford 9.0-inch rear axle. The frame is custom made from steel tubing. The body was shaped and built by Prototype Source in Santa Barbara, California. That shop will show up a few more times on this list.

By John Pearley Huffman

Photos By Getty Images

Domino’s DXP

Introduced at a 2014 franchisee convention in Las Vegas, the Domino’s Delivery eXPert car, or DXP, has become a marketing weapon in the brutal pizza-delivery wars that are likely to continue throughout the 21st century and into the 22nd. Beyond actually delivering pies, the DXP is the sort of machine that has toddlers begging parents for more pizza, teenagers forming lifelong commitments to ordering via impulsive app click, and older people—well, they don’t care.

The DXP’s origins are no mystery. It’s a Chevrolet Spark that has been modified by Roush Industries to optimize it for both delivery and marketing effectiveness. There’s an LED-lit plastic “warming oven” on board that may or may not actually keep food warmer.

Domino’s has incorporated the DXP into commercials, put more than 150 DXPs into service with franchises around the country, and risked it all with a comparison test in the world’s best car magazine.

By John Pearley Huffman

1984 Ford Econoline Mutt Cutts Van

Consider this one as a bonus. It is, after all, fictional. The Mutt Cutts van was driven by the densely dopey Lloyd Christmas and Harry Dunne in the 1994 bonehead classic Dumb and Dumber, and it reappeared in the not-so-classic 2014 sequel, Dumb and Dumber To.

It’s not much more than a Ford Econoline van (rumor has it, an ’84) covered with fur and equipped with floppy ears and a dog snout complete with nose and tongue. It’s about the stupidest thing ever to appear in any motion picture that’s not Showgirls. So, of course, it’s a beloved icon.

Of all the promotional vehicles here, this is the one that’s easiest to duplicate—and there are a lot of replicas out there. All it takes is an old van and some carpet scraps.

By John Pearley Huffman

Anheuser-Busch Bevo Car

Anheuser-Busch is most famous for its teams of Budweiser Clydesdale horses, but it was also a pioneer in the art of the promotional car. Back in the middle 1910s, the Anheuser-Busch marketers acquired a torpedo-bodied Overland touring car and used it to promote its Bevo brand of near beer. That’s a malt beverage the company made during Prohibition that lacked alcohol, making it not really beer at all.

Sometime around 1930, the brewer’s Vehicle Department, which usually occupied itself making refrigerated trucks and rail cars, produced a few more Bevo boatlike promotional vehicles including this one, the Budweiser, photographed in 1931. Classy, eh?

By John Pearley Huffman

Photos By Boston Public Library

Moxie Mobile

According to the Moxie website, Moxie is a soft drink that has been in production since about 1885. It originally was called Moxie Nerve Food, which is unnerving.

Today, Moxie has only limited distribution in the northeastern United States. But way back between the two World Wars, the company built a fleet of Moxie Mobiles using a production-car chassis and featuring a saddled faux horse from which the cars were driven. According to Hemmings.com, the last surviving original was displayed at the 2012 Ocean Reef Vintage Weekend in Key Largo, Florida. It was built atop a LaSalle chassis during 1928 and is still ridable/drivable. Well, does it make you thirsty for Moxie?

By John Pearley Huffman

Photos By Getty Images

Pepperidge Farm Goldfish Mobile

During 2002, Pepperidge Farm put this giant replica of its Goldfish cracker out onto America’s roads. As if toddlers and third graders needed another excuse to demand that their parents buy more of the cheesy little pseudo-critters.

Like many other promotional vehicles, this one was engineered and fabricated by Prototype Source in Santa Barbara. Built atop a medium-duty truck chassis, it stands 13 feet tall, stretches 23 feet in length, and wears a pair of eight-foot-wide sunglasses. You know, just like a real goldfish.

By John Pearley Huffman

Photos By Prototype Source

Hershey’s Kissmobile Cruiser

Another vehicle that emerged from the Prototype Source shop is the Hershey’s Kissmobile Cruiser. The first was built in 1997 using a GMC truck chassis and measures about 12 feet tall and 26 feet long. The success of the vehicle in promoting the tiny chocolates was such that two additional Kissmobile Cruisers were built and continue to tour the country. The original, meanwhile, has been retired to a dignified place of honor at the Antique Automobile Club of America (AACA) Museum in, appropriately, Hershey, Pennsylvania.

By John Pearley Huffman

Photos By Ken Hannah

Good Humor Truck

In 1920, Harry Burt’s daughter suggested that he insert sticks into the chocolate-coated ice cream bars he was developing. The result was an ice-cream treat with a handle, which he termed the Good Humor Ice Cream Sucker: a treat that wasn’t messy, that you could eat with one hand without the need for a cone. And even better, businesswise, it was ice cream that could be packaged in a factory and shipped in frozen bulk. Burt named his company Good Humor, and he started distributing his delicious invention around Youngstown, Ohio, in a fleet of a dozen trucks equipped with freezers and bells to announce their arrival.

By John Pearley Huffman

Photos By Getty Images

Good Humor Truck

The Good Humor truck evolved into a familiar sight around the country as the company and suburbia grew. They were so well known that, the Good Humor company recalls good-humoredly, the Chicago mob shook the company down for protection money in 1929 and destroyed some of the fleet when they didn’t get it. Later, when gasoline got more expensive in the 1970s, and more customers found it dangerous to cross traffic to get to the trucks, Good Humor’s profits fell. So in 1976, the company sold off its trucks and concentrated on supermarket sales. That eventually returned Good Humor to profitability. But even as the trucks vanished, Good Humor was still associated with them in the popular mind.

Ice-cream trucks never really went away. Some of the Good Humor trucks were bought by independent operators, and a few still ply the roads. And some of those independents stock Good Humor products.

By John Pearley Huffman

Photos By Getty Images

Good Humor Truck

Good Humor is owned by Britain’s Unilever now—one more product in a massive portfolio of brands that includes Breyer’s, Ben & Jerry’s, and Klondike bars. And the trucks are so important to Good Humor’s heritage that in 2015 it put a few trucks back on the road of some cities. You could hail one with a tweet.

By John Pearley Huffman

Oscar Mayer Wienermobile

The Wienermobile—herald of all that is Oscar Mayer hot dogs—is the king of promotional vehicles. It’s what comes to mind first; it lingers in the American zeitgeist. After all, what’s more American than a giant fiberglass hot dog in a giant fiberglass bun resting on a General Motors truck chassis?

The first Wienermobile was produced by Carl G. Mayer in 1936. That’s Mayer as in the actual Oscar Mayer’s nephew. How many Wienermobiles Mayer actually built has been lost to history, but they were all erected atop a Dodge or Willys Jeep chassis. And Little Oscar—the small-of-stature George Molchan, dressed as a chef—would drive it to events and institutions across the country, increasing hot-dog awareness.

By John Pearley Huffman

Photos By Getty Images

Oscar Mayer Wienermobile

There are currently eight Wienermobiles on permanent tour around North America. Six of them are full-size 27-footers built by Prototype Source. Two are based on Mini Coopers. In all there have been 11 different versions of the Wienermobile over its 81-year history. One of the earliest Oscar Mayer Wienermobiles, a 1952 model, is now part of the collection of the Henry Ford museum in Dearborn, Michigan. It’s near the snack bar.